Cheeze Blog

Social networks are having an increasing impact upon behaviour at work. For well over year now, we’ve been seeing press reports about one corporation after another banning the use of social networking sites such as Facebook. Yet we’ve also seen many reports of management using information found on social networks to make decisions to hire or fire staff.

So it would seem there are contradictory tendencies emerging here: companies using the information which their employees provide for assessment purposes, yet preventing the activity from taking place during work hours. Despite some notable exceptions such as Allen & Overy, where staff rebellion forced a change of policy, the trend seems to be on the side of the clampdown. But why not channel the activity productively?

In this very interesting article, Doug Cornelius makes a great case for the latter, citing many ways in which Web 2.0 benefits the worker and the work space:

Can Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 help?

• Blogs can help you to communicate
• Tagging and social bookmarking enable user-centric discovery and findability
• Micro-blogging (twitter) is the is the next-generation water cooler
• RSS feeds offer an opt-in information delivery to employees
• Wikis enable co-creation and co-ownership of information. You can build communities around shared interests
• Social networks allow for flows of communication, information and collaboration

If the water cooler failed as often as Twitter, then a lot of people would go thirsty - but Doug has some very good, positive points to make.

On the whole, it takes a far-sighted and confident company to engage with the activities of staff and support them, but this rational investment in human resources will normally be paid back by raised morale, corporate cohesion, with greater appreciation leading to feelings of security and increased productivity.

I predict that in the next 12 months, the more progressive, larger corporations will start to see social networks not just as negative time-wasting behaviour, providing information about misdemeanours, but will start to employ them in a whole range of areas, from training to product development.

As podcaster and PR practitioner Neville Hobson pointed out a year ago,

Ask Microsoft (who has 17,500 employees on Facebook), or Siemens (apparently with 6,000 employees on Facebook). They know something you need to find out.